Suppose 10 percent of the population has a disease. Everyone is tested, and your test comes back positive. The test is 80 percent accurate. What is the chance that you have the disease?
Surprisingly, it’s little more than 30 percent. If the population is 100, then 10 people have the disease. Eight of them will get a correct positive result, 2 will get a false negative, and 18 of the remaining 90 will get a false positive. That’s 26 positives, of which only 8 are correct, or 30.8 percent.
When the Golden Hind was broken up in 1662, its timbers were fashioned into a chair that still resides in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Abraham Cowley wrote an ode, “Sitting and Drinking in the Chair, Made Out of the Reliques of Sir Francis Drake’s Ship”:
As well upon a staff may Witches ride
Their fancy’d Journies in the Ayr,
As I sail round the Ocean in this Chair:
‘Tis true; but yet this Chair which here you see,
For all its quiet now, and gravitie,
Has wandred, and has travailed more,
Than ever Beast, or Fish, or Bird, or ever Tree before.
In every Ayr, and every Sea’t has been,
‘T has compas’d all the Earth, and all the Heavens ‘t has seen.
Let not the Pope’s it self with this compare,
This is the only Universal Chair.
“While armchair travelers dream of going places,” wrote Anne Tyler, “traveling armchairs dream of staying put.”
A petition submitted to the governor of the province of South Carolina by 16 maids of Charleston on March 1, 1733, “the day of the feast”:
To His Excellency Governor Johnson.
The humble petition of all the Maids who names are underwritten:–Whereas we, the humble petitioners, are at present in a very melancholy disposition of mind, considering how all the bachelors are blindly captivated by widows, and our more youthful charms thereby neglected; the consequence of this, our request, is, that your Excellency will for the future order that no widow shall presume to marry any young man till the maids are provided for; or else to pay each of them a line for satisfaction, for invading our liberties; and likewise a fine to be laid on all such bachelors as shall be married to widows, etc.
I can’t find a record of the outcome.
On Sept. 19, 1923, New Yorkers awoke to a strange composite newspaper — 2,500 web-pressmen had staged an unauthorized strike, shutting down most of the city’s large dailies, so the newspapers joined forces and put out an eight-page issue with 10 nameplates.
On the front page was a message from union president George Berry telling the pressmen to get back to work.
Two matrons were taking a train across Canada in the 1940s. The country was beautiful but vast, and eventually they lost track of their location.
The train pulled into a station, and one of the women saw a man on the platform.
“Pardon me, young man,” she said. “Can you tell me what town this is?”
The man tipped his hat and said, “Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.”
The woman turned to her friend and said, “Isn’t that charming? They don’t speak English!”
Early in July 1807, a most extraordinary phenomenon was observed by several people of credit, at the house of Mr. Rhodes, in Thornes-lane, near Wakefield. A hen had been sitting on ducks’ eggs, several of which had produced ducklings: on examining one egg, a small hole was found in one end of the shell, through which a toad was discovered, not alive, which filled the whole shell, and seemed, upon breaking it, to be absolutely straitened for want of room. Except the small hole, such as is usually found in an egg, when the animal within is mature for hatching, the shell was perfectly whole, so as utterly to preclude the supposition of the toad’s having crept in through the hole. We have ourselves seen the toad, and with a small part of the shell still adhering to it.
— Wakefield Star, quoted in Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum, 1820
Amy and Betty are playing a game. They have a chocolate bar that’s 8 squares long and 6 squares wide. Amy begins by breaking the bar in two along any division. Betty can then pick up any piece and break it in two, and so on. The first player who cannot move will be clapped in chains and rocketed off to a lifetime of soul-destroying toil in the cobalt mines of Yongar Zeta. (I know, it’s a pretty brutal game.) Who will win?
“When we have provided against cold, hunger and thirst, all the rest is but vanity and excess.” — Seneca
napiform
adj. shaped like a turnip
“Dear Sir,–I am in a madhouse. I quite forget your name or who you are. You must excuse me, for I have nothing to communicate or tell of, and why I am shut up I don’t know. I have nothing to say, so I remain yours faithfully, JOHN CLARE.”
So wrote John Clare to an inquirer in 1860. At that point he had spent 18 years in a Northamptonshire asylum, after a promising if penurious career as a nature poet. His first volume, in 1820, had been brought out by Keats’ publisher and highly praised, but by 1835 he was descending into alcoholism and mental illness, confusing himself with Byron and Shakespeare and at one point interrupting a performance of The Merchant of Venice to berate Shylock.
Today Clare is ranked among the greatest of 19th-century poets, one whose sensitive nature had become increasingly disjoint as the industrial and agricultural revolutions swept the idyllic English countryside of his youth.
More’s the pity. When completing the paperwork to confine him to the asylum in 1841, Clare’s doctor had considered the question “Was the insanity preceded by any severe or long-continued mental emotion or exertion?” He answered, “After years of poetical prosing.”